Jeff Bezos to Step Down as Amazon CEO
I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have.
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Being the CEO of Amazon is a deep responsibility, and it’s consuming. When you have a responsibility like that, it’s hard to put attention on anything else. As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions.
What is clear, though, is that any attempt to understand the relentlessness of the company redirects to their founder, Jeff Bezos, who announced plans to step down as CEO after leading the company for twenty-seven years. He is arguably the greatest CEO in tech history, in large part because he created three massive businesses, all of which generate enormous consumer surplus and enjoy impregnable moats: Amazon.com, AWS, and the Amazon platform (this is a grab-all term for the Amazon Marketplace and Fulfillment offerings; it is lumped in with Amazon.com in the company’s reporting). These three businesses are the result of Bezos’ rare combination of strategic thinking, boldness, and drive, and the real world manifestations of Amazon’s three most important tactics: leverage the Internet, win with scale, and being your first best — but not only — customer.
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What is somewhat ironic, though, is that while the Internet is unquestionably a critical component of what makes Amazon Amazon, what makes the company so valuable and seemingly impregnable is the way it has integrated backwards into the world of atoms. Real moats are built with real dollars, and Bezos has been relentless in pushing the company to continually invest in solving problems with real world costs, from delivery trucks to data centers and everything in-between. This application of tech economics to the real world is what sets Bezos apart.
With Jeff Bezos stepping down as CEO, here’s a thread of the best things I’ve learned from him.
Update (2021-02-05): Dan Rose:
In 2004 I got the opportunity to work with Jeff Bezos to develop the original Kindle. It was Amazon’s first foray into hardware and I learned a ton from my interactions with Jeff. Here’s some of the stories and lessons that I took away from that experience[…]
See also:
- Susan Schroeder (via John Gruber)
- Om Malik
- Jeff Bezos 1997 Interview (via Hacker News)
- Steven Levy (via Hacker News)
Update (2021-02-08): See also:
- Chip Bayers (in 1999, tweet)
- Tim Bray
- Om Malik
